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Telepresence—communications tools that let people "meet" remotely—is coming of age. Will high-def conference rooms and, yes, robots end business travel?
ByDrake Bennett
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Vgo Communications' $5,995 telepresence robot stands in for remote workers Fredrik Broden
Last year, according to the Global Business Travel Assn., Americans took 427 million business trips. They traveled to make sales presentations, do site visits, check in on branch offices, meet with suppliers, placate clients, lobby politicians, man job fair booths, interview applicants, and lay off employees. They traveled to attend corporate retreats, trade shows, continuing-education conferences, and bald-faced junkets. Then they traveled more to get back home.
The bill for all this was $228 billion, along with untold gallons of jet fuel, tons of carbon dioxide, hours spent in traffic, and missed family dinners. All of it because of the belief that there's no substitute for face-to-face contact. We can easily and instantly project parts of ourselves over great distances: The phone carries our voices, e-mail sends our writing, videoconferencing transmits our images. But none of these provide a sense of human presence—the feeling that a person is actually right in front of us. To size people up or win their trust or smoothly collaborate on a complex, dynamic task, you still need to be there.
In the past few years, a set of technologies has emerged with the potential to change that calculation. The term the creators of these new tools use is "telepresence." Some are custom-built meeting rooms with a bank of high-definition screens and cameras, others take the form of vaguely humanoid robots. None of them fool people into thinking their distant interlocutors are right there, any more than viewers at a 3D movie really think they're in danger during an onscreen car chase. The moviegoers still flinch, though.
"You can look somebody in the eye," says Rich Redelfs, a partner at the venture firm Foundation Capital, which uses a telepresence suite built by Cisco Systems (CSCO) to meet with companies—many of them in India—that the fund is thinking of investing in. "A lot of what we do in venture is, we invest in people. You want to look somebody in the eye and say, Do I trust this person enough to write them a multimillion-dollar check? We feel we can do that with telepresence."
Already, Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America (BAC), PepsiCo (PEP), Procter & Gamble (PG) , and Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) have installed Cisco's "immersive suites," which cost upwards of $300,000, for management meetings. P&G is also trying them out for consumer focus groups. The software company Autodesk (ADSK) has 20 telepresence suites worldwide and has cut travel by 16 percent since installing its first ones three years ago. The social game developer Zynga uses immersive units made by Polycom (PLCM) to coordinate far-flung designers and programmers; the CBS (CBS) show The Good Wife conducts bicoastal writers' meetings through them. Hospitals are setting them up to allow neurologists to remotely diagnose stroke patients who show up in the emergency room. Polycom Chief Executive Officer Andrew M. Miller says a fellow CEO has installed a suite in the garage of his vacation home in Hawaii. "I can't tell you his name, of course, but he's one of many," Miller says.
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ByDrake Bennett
Browse Issues
Browse the BusinessWeek Archive
Vgo Communications' $5,995 telepresence robot stands in for remote workers Fredrik BrodenLast year, according to the Global Business Travel Assn., Americans took 427 million business trips. They traveled to make sales presentations, do site visits, check in on branch offices, meet with suppliers, placate clients, lobby politicians, man job fair booths, interview applicants, and lay off employees. They traveled to attend corporate retreats, trade shows, continuing-education conferences, and bald-faced junkets. Then they traveled more to get back home.
The bill for all this was $228 billion, along with untold gallons of jet fuel, tons of carbon dioxide, hours spent in traffic, and missed family dinners. All of it because of the belief that there's no substitute for face-to-face contact. We can easily and instantly project parts of ourselves over great distances: The phone carries our voices, e-mail sends our writing, videoconferencing transmits our images. But none of these provide a sense of human presence—the feeling that a person is actually right in front of us. To size people up or win their trust or smoothly collaborate on a complex, dynamic task, you still need to be there.
In the past few years, a set of technologies has emerged with the potential to change that calculation. The term the creators of these new tools use is "telepresence." Some are custom-built meeting rooms with a bank of high-definition screens and cameras, others take the form of vaguely humanoid robots. None of them fool people into thinking their distant interlocutors are right there, any more than viewers at a 3D movie really think they're in danger during an onscreen car chase. The moviegoers still flinch, though.
"You can look somebody in the eye," says Rich Redelfs, a partner at the venture firm Foundation Capital, which uses a telepresence suite built by Cisco Systems (CSCO) to meet with companies—many of them in India—that the fund is thinking of investing in. "A lot of what we do in venture is, we invest in people. You want to look somebody in the eye and say, Do I trust this person enough to write them a multimillion-dollar check? We feel we can do that with telepresence."
Already, Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America (BAC), PepsiCo (PEP), Procter & Gamble (PG) , and Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) have installed Cisco's "immersive suites," which cost upwards of $300,000, for management meetings. P&G is also trying them out for consumer focus groups. The software company Autodesk (ADSK) has 20 telepresence suites worldwide and has cut travel by 16 percent since installing its first ones three years ago. The social game developer Zynga uses immersive units made by Polycom (PLCM) to coordinate far-flung designers and programmers; the CBS (CBS) show The Good Wife conducts bicoastal writers' meetings through them. Hospitals are setting them up to allow neurologists to remotely diagnose stroke patients who show up in the emergency room. Polycom Chief Executive Officer Andrew M. Miller says a fellow CEO has installed a suite in the garage of his vacation home in Hawaii. "I can't tell you his name, of course, but he's one of many," Miller says.
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